


The Art of Scraping Through

by bookhousegirl



Category: The Wire
Genre: Awkward First Times, Character Study, F/M, One Night Stands, Pre-Canon, Season 2
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-11
Updated: 2018-01-11
Packaged: 2019-03-03 07:46:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,034
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13336647
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bookhousegirl/pseuds/bookhousegirl
Summary: It's a strange night out for Beadie when she runs into the best guy she knows, like waking from a dream. Or maybe being caught in one.





	The Art of Scraping Through

**Author's Note:**

> Finally finished my rewatch of S2 and I really wanted to write about one moment caught in time between these two. I hope I didn’t take too many liberties with Beadie. I just wanted to explore a side of her beyond being practical and reliable and decent at policing. I always felt this little tug of “what if” when watching her with Frank. Warning - I have a lot of feelings about Frank Sobotka.
> 
> Title from Someone New by Hozier.
> 
> I wrote this with the knowledge that this is for me and that basically zero people will read this. But if you do, I really appreciate it and hope you like it!

 

\---

 

Craig dumps Beadie on a Wednesday morning, over the phone, right before her shift. A good guy probably would’ve done it in person, she figures. They dated for almost a year, after all. A good guy wouldn’t leave her in the lurch on a Wednesday, when Jack needs a pickup from swim practice at the Druid Hill Y and it was supposed to be Craig, trying his hand to see if he was dad material. Instead it’s her real dad, an actual good guy, having to park on the street over by the baptist church and then bake chicken nuggets in the toaster and help with math homework, til she gets done.

 

To top it all off, she can’t leave work on time either, extending her dad’s babysitting past dinner, because Ziggy Sobotka decided to act like a twelve-year-old and use an actual manifest for drawing a gallery of dick sketches entitled _Peen of the Stevedores._

 

“Take a good long look. It’s as impressive as it looks on paper, I can assure you, ma’am,” Ziggy says as she scans the document to try to read the missing letters and numbers obscured behind sharpie.

 

A bunch of the dock guys razz Ziggy, and when Beadie meets Frank’s tired eyes, liquid with understanding, Frank shakes his head. He’s contrite even though he didn’t do this and he can’t control his kid, who has immaturity pouring from his bones. At the very least, Ziggy didn’t draw Frank’s dick, thank jesus. There’s an unspoken apology in Frank’s half-shrug and she’s grateful.

 

“Sorry for keeping you, darlin’,” he drawls, close to her side.

 

“Not keeping me from anything,” she answers, and that could not be more true today.

 

“It still wasn’t right.”

 

She throws that same half-shrug back at him.

 

This shit, for better or worse, is her job. Ostensibly he leaves her alone, talking to a bunch of his guys by some shipping containers, stacked like over-sized legos a mile high, but he might still be watching for whatever reason. And also for whatever reason, Beadie tries to walk stronger, tries to arch her back just a fraction more, as she finishes up the paperwork and gives Frank a wave from the front seat of her patrol car. He jogs over; places his hand on the roof and leans into the car window. It reminds her of an old movie, something out of American Graffiti.

 

“Hey, when you drive around here, what’re you listening to?”

 

The question surprises her. And she knows she shouldn’t feel caught out, Frank’s not going to report her or anything, for driving with headphones in down the endless rows of stacked freight, but she ducks her head anyway. “This is, um, Aerosmith.”

 

“Aerosmith. I like it,” he laughs, warm and bubbly, and he might as well be saying _I like you,_ instead.

 

It’s what she’s thinking about when she finally makes it home, to find that Craig has left exactly zero messages on her answering machine, not that she expected a single one. Cary refused to eat the broccoli that her dad cooked and Jack hid a whole page of his social studies workbook on the explorer Henry Hudson. The piles of random shit, bills, laundry, toys, spill over on every available counter, in every conceivable space.

 

There was a house once, that she saw in a Chesapeake home living magazine while sitting in the dentist’s waiting area, with white-washed closets and billowy, lemon-fresh curtains. A place where you could hide the mess, the eternal clutter. Or maybe a place so perfect that there was never any clutter to begin with. After looking around stealthily, like she was doing something wrong, she tried to rip it out cleanly. The glossy paper didn’t agree, because it never does, and left the edge jagged at the bottom of the page. Still, she folded it up and stowed it in her pocket, and put it in the glove compartment of her vehicle, to look at during the slow hours of driving the port.

 

Some days she thinks about moving out of Baltimore. Picking up and leaving it all, just like the ex did. Somewhere random and indistinct. Just a dot off of a line printed on a faded Rand McNally in the backseat. Chillicothe Ohio. Bowling Green Kentucky. Scranton Pennsylvania. Somewhere that feels like nowhere at all.

 

\---

 

She has never figured out how to look dressed up without looking trashy. Her best going out clothes are about eight years old, but this blue jersey dress hugs at least some of her curves, that have been hidden under bulky coats and unflattering tan trousers and mom jeans for years.

 

Blonde hair might look nice, she thinks, as she catches her reflection when she goes to lock the porch door. She kicks two race trucks out of the way so she can slide the door closed, and they go careening under a chair.

 

When she bends down, hardwood floors pressing into her knees, she finds twenty rubber bands underneath the sofa, and a doodle drawn by Cary, with a cotton-candy pink rose and a yellow orb of sunshine. _I’m happy!_ scrawled at the top in messy crayola marker. Beadie takes it to her room and tapes it on the inside of her closet door before heading back to the bathroom and fishing out her brightest red lip gloss.

 

She kisses her dad goodbye, eyes closed in a silent thank you, and takes a cab to Fells Point, where she struggles to walk on the cobble in her kitten heels from Payless, faux crocodile and deep maroon.

 

“Men! Fuck ‘em!” her friend Karen, from back in her toll-collecting days, yells out when she finally makes her way through the crowded bar. Karen pushes a shot glass of vodka towards her and Beadie closes her eyes before she swallows.

 

Karen’s loud and garish and bright like a spotlight. All of the things Beadie isn’t. “So what happened?” she demands, perched on the unsteady bar stool like she’s holding court, with Beadie just standing around beside her.

 

“Couldn’t handle it. The usual.”

 

“A total douche then.” Karen sighs. “God, Beadie you sure do know how to pick ‘em.”

 

Beadie laughs. “That I do,” she says, and automatically scans the room, as if she’s actually going to pick someone here tonight.

 

Eventually Karen finds herself a cute guy, a _young_ guy, who wants to dance a little, or make out, or fuck, and Beadie hops up on the stool to finish her Killian’s that she’s been nursing for the last half hour.

 

“You need a refill?”

 

A stubby pointer finger, thick like a sausage in casing taps the side of her pint glass. She’s unsuccessful, mostly, at not doing a double take when Frank Sobotka slides onto the stool next to her, his dark blue denim jeans stretching wide against his thighs which hang over his seat.

 

“Sure,” she says, and remembers to breathe. She rests her elbow against the bar, can feel her cheek push up against her fist. Remembering that it probably looks unattractive, and she’s here to look attractive, she drops her hand back to her lap and fiddles with the leather tassel dangling from the zipper on her purse. “You come here a lot?”

 

He laughs, and it sounds happy, like she genuinely said something funny. She feels the corners of her mouth tugging upward too. “What,” she says, her smile getting wider against her will.

 

“No, nothing, it’s just. Is that your best line or something?”

 

“What? That wasn’t a line!”

 

“Okay. Because I was gonna say, if that’s what you’re using on guys around here.” Frank pauses and he taps his finger on his own whiskey glass, the bevels appearing and disappearing as he moves it. “Well, never mind. A girl like you, if you said anything to these boneheads, you’d probably get an offer for dinner down at Morton’s right away. Or something.”

 

He hasn’t been looking at her and when he finally does, she’s glad. This whole circumstance has been odd, and maybe a bad idea, but there are the eyes of her friend staring back at her and she feels her world shift right again. Frank’s good at that kind of thing, she decides. Shifting things right.

 

“All I’ve done is say hello,” she tells him.

 

This time his laugh feels different, not warm and genuinely drawn from him. There’s an edge, and she’s sorry for what she said. “Hello is probably good enough, Beadie.”

 

“Good enough for what?”

 

“Good enough for what you’re looking for.”

 

She pulls back. “What am I looking for?”

 

“You’re really bad at this, aren’t you.”

 

“Am I?”

 

Frank laughs again. “Wanna get out of here?”

 

Beadie scans the bar area for Karen. “Well, I came here to meet a friend.” Karen’s crowded against the wall by the cute guy. “I should make sure she’s gonna be okay.”

 

“That’s John Garrison’s kid. His dad works for one of the shipping companies. I’ve known the family for years.” When she looks apprehensively at him, he reaches for her arm, just above the elbow. It’s just a little pat, a reassurance, but she’s shocked by the fact that it’s the first time they’ve touched. He doesn’t seem moved at all, and continues, “She’ll be fine. I wouldn’t make that up or feed you some b.s. just so you’ll leave with me.”

 

The strange thing is, or maybe not strange at all, she believes him. “I could use a ride home then, I suppose,” she says, grabbing her coat and smiling. The smile feels wrong to do, sits wrong in her stomach, like it’s an invitation or encouragement instead of a half-uncertain wish, that he’ll take her somewhere off the map, that he won’t drive her home, or a misplaced fear that he will. She doesn’t think either of them knows the difference.

 

\---

 

There’s a song playing on the radio when he turns on the truck and pulls out of the parking lot where men are getting in one last smoke with their buddies by their cars, before they return home reeking of the bar and bad decisions. The song sounds old, like a jangly lullabye, an echo for teenagers swaying in a gymnasium of gauzy pink. Arms clasped tightly around a strong, dependable neck. A girl’s head on a boy’s shoulder in a time much more simple. Back then Frank was probably football team captain. Someone popular and well-liked. You’d have to be, to do the kind of job he does now.

 

“I like this,” she says, settling back and letting her legs fall open, letting her coat slip to the side.

 

“Yeah?” Frank looks, for just a second, appreciatively. She meant the music, the romantic out-of-place song, but didn’t say that, and so now he’s thinking that she meant something else. It’s hard to figure out, if that’s a good or a bad thing. They stop at a light and Frank doesn’t look at her again. He’s staring straight ahead.

 

“So Ziggy, he’s your only kid?”

 

“Yeah.”

 

“Why didn’t you and - and your wife have any more?” It’s the first time that the fact that Frank has a wife, and she’s kind of _doing this_ crosses her mind.

 

“I guess we always meant to? And just didn’t.” Frank frowns. The light at the intersection blinks from red to green. “We were young. There’s a lot of things that we meant to do.”

 

“I’m sorry,” she says, and it feels like the right thing.

 

In the eerie haze of the streetlights he seems different. Less like the brash, tough-talking jokester at the port. More like a prom date, a decent guy who would dress up to impress your mother, and bring a cheapo box of drug store chocolates for Valentine’s Day, in a kind of hopeless, adorably sweet attempt to get laid. In this light, diffused and soft with nostalgia, she thinks he could’ve been her prom date. They’re probably the same age, or almost, even though she feels less sure of herself about practically everything. Out in the world, other than her kids, no one depends on her to protect them, to make decisions that affect their whole lives.   

 

It’s somehow not a surprise then, that the guy everybody turns to is the guy she’s turning to now too.

 

Two streets over from her house, there’s a parking lot for a factory where they make bread, lonely at this time of night. He eases the truck between the white painted lines of a spot and sets the parking brake. White puffs of flour float all around them, like steam, or snow.

 

“This is like magic,” she says as she gazes out the truck window. “I’ve lived here for fifteen years and never saw this before.”

 

Frank looks at her then, soft and young, the way her children do when they want something from her and are sure she’s going to give it.

 

“Beadie,” he says, leaning forward just slightly. “Can I?” And she doesn’t think he means to do it, but his voice wavers the tiniest bit, and it’s him, and he’s the one unsure what she might say or do, and something in her chest aches.

 

She closes the distance between them, erasing the indecision that’s in his eyes. When they kiss, his lips are rough, of course, and he tastes like salt from the bar pretzels and a delicious burn from the Wild Turkey he was drinking. He’s groaning into it, he’s swallowing her up with it.

 

Instinctively she leaves his mouth and moves lower. His belt and the button from his jeans have left indentations on his stomach. Ever so gently he puts his hand on her cheek when she bends to kiss the marks.

 

With his hand he turns her face and the diluted yellow glow of the light from the street cuts across the truck bench, separating them. “You don’t have to.”

 

“I want to, if you want to.”

 

“I’m not some, you know, star on the Ravens or something.”

 

“No,” she says, not because she’s disappointed, but because she would never want him to be. She nuzzles at the soft dark hair on his rounded stomach, noses her way down past the standard tight waistband of his standard white briefs.

 

She’s barely had a chance to breathe him in, to touch him where he’s hard when there’s a tug on her shoulder. “I don’t wanna, not yet,” he whispers. “Not before I get to -” and he kisses her again.

 

It’s inelegant. The uncomfortable bench of a truck, slippery and chilly under her back with Frank above her. His fingers, which tapped nervously on his glass two hours before, now struggle with pushing her underwear aside before sinking deep inside her. She’s wet, but probably not enough. She toes off her tiny shoes onto the floorboard and arches her back, the same one she does when she walks the docks and thinks he’s watching, trying to get into it, trying to get him to go deeper.

 

Frustrated, she pulls his hand out and licks up and down his fingers until they’re shiny and sopping. Then she guides him back down, with her own sour tang on her tongue.

 

“Jesus,” he stutters out, and uses his fingers to fuck between her legs, the motion in and out, like a blade.

 

He’s reaching down, struggling with his pants, when she thinks to ask, “Hey, do you got something?”

 

He bites his lip and looks like a kid. “Dammit. I don’t, you know, do this kind of thing. I don’t have one in my wallet or nothing.”

 

“Are you -”

 

“My wife had Ziggy twenty-two years ago. I haven’t been with anybody else, anybody at all.”

 

She expects him to be embarrassed when he says it. Like not whoring around on your wife, being a man who honors a vow, is something the stevedores would give him shit for. But Frank just says it like a plain fact, like he doesn’t feel bad about it at all. He doesn’t ask about her, just watches her wiggle out of her pink underwear and hitch up her dress to her thighs, his mouth slightly open.

 

It’s hard to know what to think, when he’s on top of her, grunting and fucking into her. Things aren’t so easily categorized, like touching the stove and thinking _hot,_ like looking at Cary and Jack and thinking _love._ Her brain struggles to supply a word and she can’t come up with anything. It’s not good, it’s not bad. She’s filled with Frank.

 

And maybe that’s it, maybe that’s what she’s searching for, trying to supply. Frank. She can smell him, spicy like cinnamon and sweaty like the summer, where her nose bangs repeatedly against his neck, just below the stubble on his jaw.

 

“It’s good,” she decides to say anyway, and Frank shifts to look at her quickly, to check her eyes to see if she’s telling the truth, like he expects a lie, as if she’s one of his workers who took too long on a smoke break. Whatever he sees there makes him catch his breath, makes him speed up the thrust of his hips until he can’t contain his moans, and he’s coming inside her, with his hands bracketed against her head.

 

After he comes, he holds himself up on the seat with one hand, so he won’t crush her with his body weight. His arm is shaking a little bit, wobbling with the strain. _A gentleman,_ Beadie thinks, before he pulls out, rolls away.

 

He touches her collarbone lightly, breathes in at the hollow of her throat. His eyes are closed.

 

“Sleepy,” she confesses. Outside the window one of the streetlights has gone out. A siren wails further off. The flour has dissipated and the parking lot is clear and empty. She can hear Frank.

 

He smiles, and kisses her temple gently. “Feels like I’ve just woken up,” he says. “From a really good dream.”

 

Her place is close, but it takes them a while to get there, the one-way streets making the route circuitous. Time, and the drive, stretch out, and it’s like trying to wade forward in the ocean. When they finally pull up at the curb, Frank doesn’t shut off the engine either, just rests puts his palms down on his jeans and waits.

 

“I guess I better get inside,” she says. “My dad’s over to watch the kids and I hope he didn’t wait up. I’d invite you in, but it might make it weird.”

 

“Probably best not to then.”

 

“My dad might be waiting with his shotgun.”

 

“You are literally just like a prom date,” laughs Frank. “It’s okay, darlin’. I’ll see ya around.”

 

Her dad isn’t waiting up though, when she slips inside the door and locks it behind her. He’s in the recliner by the window, with the Sun folded over his knee. She sets the paper on the couch and doesn’t wake him.

 

Upstairs alone in bed she touches herself so that she can have an orgasm, and falls asleep ten minutes later thinking about the smell of fresh baked bread.

 

\---

 

The first two times she sees him afterwards, nothing’s different. Friendly waves and sympathetic looks pass between them, and she walks with her back arched and maybe the only real difference is now she knows he’s watching.

 

The third time she has to knock on the door to his trailer and wait to be let in. She talks to him about a report, nothing flashy, nothing special, and the two guys who were there, shooting the shit, look at her like she has two heads.

 

“You wanna...sometime? Get a drink or something?” Frank stands close to her when he walks her out, as she pretends to find the flimsy magnet that you can get from the cover of the white pages, on the file cabinet near the door, fascinating. “I’d take you to Morton’s.”

 

“There’s no point, Frank.” She tries to smile.

 

“There could be. A point.”

 

The shirt he’s sporting now is a little nicer than she has ever seen him wear. Not his usual dark colors and flannel, hanging open so that the buttons don’t strain to contain his belly. It’s white and fine gauge cotton with tiny blue dots speckled all over. She wants to touch it without touching him.

 

And the look he’s giving her doesn’t say _love,_ not yet. But if he’s categorizing things in his brain, he might stumble upon it one day, or choose it, very carefully, the way she imagines Frank weighing his work, his efforts, all the things that matter in his life. It makes her shiver beneath her olive green coat.

 

She’s not better than him. It’s not that. She's not out of his league. He’s just not the right _kind_ of him is all. He’s married, and will always be married. He’s got a Ziggy, and a makeshift trailer for an office full of guys who need him to lead for them, to fight for them no matter how he has to bend things or shift things from wrong to right.

 

She’s got a badge and a patrol vehicle and a Jack and a Cary, and her life has no bend in it. Or not enough to accommodate even someone as deeply loyal as Frank Sobotka.

 

“I like you Beadie, okay?” he says quietly. “That’s all this is about. I like you.”

 

“I like you too.”

 

“So what else is it possibly about then?”

 

Before she has time to think of an answer, or how to say her answer best, there’s a crash from the door and Ziggy is yelling, “Why don’t you suck my cock, dickwipe?” to an older, much brawnier guy who Nick is holding back.

 

Frank sighs and rolls his eyes. “This is why, you know. Why I only had one,” he explains, and she laughs.

 

“Good decision then,” she quips.

 

“Best,” he responds, and leans forward, like he’s going to peck her on the lips, here, out in the open. Instead he just smiles against the side of her face, into her tangled mousy hair that she didn’t have time to wash this morning. “Think about it anyway,” he says, before pulling away to read the riot act to Zig.

 

\---

 

Then there are dead girls in a can. Thirteen Jane Does in white zippered bags. No names, no papers, no lives to speak of. Enough to make you take stock of things, make you hold your daughter a little closer at night. Enough to make you long for the days when Ziggy’s adolescent artwork and the three hours of bureaucratic bullshit to follow were the worst that could possibly happen.

 

She’s been meeting with medical examiners and going over charts. She’s been asking questions that she’s never had to ask before. When they come in and say who’s in charge, who’s handling the dead girls, they look at her. From across the lot she can tell Frank is shaken too, that he knows there are a million things not right about this and no way to begin to fix them.

 

“Which one of your detectives caught all the dead girls?” asks a cop with a ridiculous hat and she snorts.

 

Right away she jokes, “Detectives? They’re all at the bar already,” and she surprises herself by being so forward and brash.

 

His name is Jimmy McNulty. She likes his smile that starts out too fast, not hiding any secrets behind his teeth. And the way he walks around, shiny shoes that are brand new making perfect prints like a wood block cut-out on the docks. She likes the way his blue trousers are pleated askew. Like he needs a little fixing. Someone to shift things just right.

 

That evening she drives home to relieve her dad, in time to help with multiplication and spelling. The bread factory is just a building like any other, of brick and glass and stone. The parking lot is an empty mass of blacktop and weeds, no clouds of white dancing in the air, just Aerosmith on the radio, no faraway love song to put her under its spell.

 


End file.
